 | |
| Company type | Public company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Trade |
| Founded | 1728 (1728) |
| Defunct | 1785 (1785) |
| Fate | Dissolved |
| Successor | Royal Company of the Philippines |
| Headquarters | , |
Area served | Venezuela Province |
TheRoyal Guipuzcoan Company of Caracas (Spanish:Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas) was a Spanishchartered company which existed from 1728 to 1785. It conducted trade withSpain's overseas colonies and maintained its own fleet of warships and privateers to defend the company's merchantmen. In 1785, after having several of its ships captured by theRoyal Navy during theAmerican Revolutionary War, the company was merged with theBarcelona Trading Company to form theRoyal Company of the Philippines.
Since 1503, under the Habsburg kings, all Spanish trade with America had been conducted through the port ofSeville (and after 1717,Cádiz) under a monopoly that prevented other cities, includingBarcelona orSan Sebastián, from trade with the Americas, or the Indies as they were known. Tentatively by the late 17th century Basques goods had reached the Indies via the Spanish coastal trade to Cádiz and this grew slowly until the Guipuzcoan company was founded by a group of wealthy Basques from the province ofGipuzkoa in 1728. The specific aim of the Basque company, acting almost autonomously with tasks of military nature at their own command and expense, was to break thede factoDutch monopoly on the cocoa trade in theCaptaincy General of Venezuela.
It was initially based in San Sebastián and received itsroyal decree on September 25, 1728, byPhilip V of Spain.[1] Its creation was part of the largerBourbon Reforms to control unlicensed trading, especially intobacco, which existed along theOrinoco River between Spanish colonists and Dutch, British and French merchants, who were preferred by the landholders of Canary Islander descent as trade partners. The Venezuelan possessions and their managerial wealthy Creole class thus operated detached from themetropole. The Venezuelan colonial system turned into an embarrassment and hardly productive for the Spanish Crown in terms of revenue. Between 1700 and 1728 only five vessels set sail from Spain to Venezuela.[2]
The establishment of the company resulted fromnegotiations engaged with the Basque governments in the aftermath of the bloody military campaign ordered byPhilip V of Spain over the western Basque districts. The government ofGipuzkoa in particular came up with a proposal for the re-establishment of commerce with Venezuela that would suit the Basque interests and those of the Spanish king alike. The plan was approved, with theBasques getting total exclusivity on that commerce.[2]
The Guipuzcoana Company was the only body entitled to sell European goods in Venezuela (or Caracas) Province and toexport Venezuelan agricultural products to Spain. Goods imported on to other Spanish territories would incur no custom duties on the Ebro river according to the treaty signed with the Spanish king Philip V, and the company was able to trade freely throughout Europe.[1] The company would in turn export iron commodities to Venezuela. The Guipuzcoana Company became the first shares based company in Spain, participated byBasque shareholders and the king of Spain.
Since 1743, the company received permission to charter vessels under the French flag, which could trade directly with Venezuela.[3] The main beneficiaries of that decision were no doubt the coast of the Basque province ofLabourd, andBayonne.
The company began operating in 1730—four ships departed from San Sebastián taking on board a crew of 561 and 40–50 cannons. The vessels were hailed with frontal hostility by the Venezuelan Creoles, a refusal to sell cocoa to the company, and an uprising against the newcomers and the local Spanish garrison, until control was re-established.
The Company's ships used to travel overloaded, in order to increase the profits coming from the cocoa monopoly. The very high profitability of the business and the overexploitation of the ship's cargo capacity allowed the crews to smuggle. The Company needed to recover the investment with the greatest possible profit margin, and the Crown required this to be a tool of war. In June 1733, theSan Ignatius de Loyola was preparing for his return to Passages from La Guaira. He returned with a cocoa overload 5.5 percent higher than his actual capacity, not counting the space occupied by other effects, such as food, water, ammunition, etc. He made his journey in 76 days, almost 10 days longer than the average of the Company's ships. In the last trip to La Guaira at the sight on the reefs of the island of La Anegada the captain couldn't stop the ship from falling on starboard. About 300 people died in this tragedy. Thus the San Ignatius shipwrecked.
The Basques started to settle down in Venezuelan territory on wealthyhaciendas that boosted plantations and agricultural production. However, the move was resented by other establishedCreoles based on the fact that it brought down prices to be sold to the company.[4] The Basques established settlements, built dock facilities, and fortifications. The termun gran cacao became a nickname for a member of the new powerful class (and to this day the term is used jocularly in Venezuela for aVIP). It did not help smaller farmers who continued to participate in illegal trading.
The company was instrumental in the development of large-scalecocoa production along the valleys of the coast and encouraged the production of such crops as tobacco, indigo, cotton and coffee.[5] In addition, the company promoted the exploration and settlement of frontier areas, most famously under the border expedition of 1750-1761 headed by a company agent, José de Iturriaga y Aguirre, which resulted in new settlements in theGuayana region.
The company's control of the major ports ofLa Guaira andPuerto Cabello meant that it effectively monopolized the legal trade of the other Venezuelan provinces. In addition, the company's strict control of much needed manufactured imports naturally created a lot of resentment in a region which depended on these. Several rebellions took place against the company and the Basques in which ethnic confrontation came to a head in 1749, which saw localcriollos supported by the Dutch and British confront the powerful Basques supported by the Spanish Crown.[6] The rebellion was led by Juan Francisco de León, a Canary Islander just replaced as Corporal of War (1749), but the Spanish Crown could not shrink from protecting its own interests by supporting the company, and quelling the uprising that very year.
Apart from breaking the Dutch monopoly and creating significant wealth in the Basque port cities, the company provided a fast track to job positions for many Basques. The company's activity kept active Basque forges which were gradually declining in the face of growing competition from their British counterparts, and fed indirectly the arms factories ofSoraluze (Placencia de las Armas) andTolosa. Another outcome was the foundation inBergara of theRoyal Basque Society of Friends of the Country by a group under the leadership ofXavier María de Munibe e Idiáquez, Count of Peñaflorida, in 1765. Its model expanded to the Spanish heartland prompting the establishment of the "Sociedad Económica de los Amigos del País"—a type ofEnlightenmentthink tank.
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While Basque involvement increased after 1749, the Spanish Crown dealt a critical blow to the Basques when it diffused the Basque grip over the company by transferring its headquarters to Madrid, a move contested by Gipuzkoa, and imposing the requirement to include a Spaniard in a board of directors of three (1751).[7]
On October 1778,Charles III of Spain signed theFree Trade Regulations culminating the free trade process that had begun in 1765. The regulations were composed of 55 articles, expanded freedom of trade and enabled 13 metropolitan ports including Margarita Island and Trinidad Island. The ports of Venezuela mainland (La Guaira, Puerto Cabello, Cumaná, Maracaibo, and Angostura) were excluded to protect the interests of the Royal Gipuzkoan Company along with the ports of New Spain, for fear that the prosperity of this territory would lead to a lack of concern for other less active areas, which went against the guiding idea of the project.
During theAmerican Revolutionary War, numerous ships of the company were captured by theRoyal Navy, including in the actions of8 January 1780 and15 January 1782. On 8 January 1780, 7 warships and 15 merchantmen of the company were captured, and on 15 January 1782 2 of the company's merchant ships were captured. Combined this facts with the liberalization of commerce with Venezuela in 1778, the weakening company's monopoly came to an end. The Spanish Crown no longer saw the need for a monopolizing company to control and grow the economy, since by that time the Venezuelan economy had matured and been tightly linked with the markets of Spain andNew Spain, which consumed most of its cocoa. The Spanish crown terminated the company's charter in 1784. A key effect of the Caracas Company, despite its eventual commercial failure, was that it guaranteed the place of Caracas in the captaincy-general.[8] When the Crown established a high court (Real Audiencia) in theCaptaincy General of Venezuela in 1786, it was sited in Caracas.[9]
The owners of the Guipuzcoana Company merged it with theBarcelona Trading Company to form theRoyal Company of the Philippines in 1785. In Caracas aconsulado de mercaderes (a merchants'guild) replaced the company in 1793. One of the most active proponents of the move wasFrançois Cabarrus, 1st Count of Cabarrús, a prominent company stockholder hailing from a merchant family inBayonne,Labourd, who was increasingly involved in Spanish finances and politics.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)[permanent dead link], p. 90
Media related toCompañía Guipuzcoana at Wikimedia Commons
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